It’s always a fascinating thought experiment to wonder what the lasting legacy of modern society will be. Artifacts such as the pyramids are still with us after thousands of years; but what will stand as a testament to the current stage of civilization?

Artist and author Trevor Paglen has a unique answer: Placing an artifact in orbit around the Earth. On November 20, a launch from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan will place the communications satellite EchoStar XVI into Geosynchronous Orbit. And, while such a deployment isn’t anything extraordinary, attached to its anti-Earthward deck is an ultra-archival disc entitled The Last Pictures. A gold-silicon disc encased in a gold-plated aluminium shell, The Last Pictures contains 100 snapshots of modern life along with four years worth of collected interviews with artists, scientists and great thinkers of the 21st century.

The disc isn’t the first “space time capsule” of its kind. The Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft launched in the 1970s are carrying discs and plaques containing the songs and sounds of Earth along with instructions for playing them and retrieving data. These spacecraft are all on escape trajectories out of the solar system and will drift about the Milky Way galaxy for millions of years. A fifth spacecraft, NASA’s New Horizons, is also on an escape trajectory out of the solar system after it passes Pluto on its primary mission in July 2015. And while New Horizons doesn’t contain a similar artifact, it does have the names of supporters etched on a CD-ROM disk along with a small cache of Clyde Tombaugh’s (the discoverer of Pluto) ashes and a Maryland state quarter. Of course, what an alien sentience would make of those, it’s tough to say.

Unlike satellites in low Earth orbit, geosynchronous satellites will stay in orbit for billions of years. First proposed by futurist and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke in 1945, placing a satellite such as EchoStar XVI 35,786 kilometers above the Earth’s equator allows it to orbit once every sidereal day, just shy of 24 hours. This is an excellent site to place a communications satellite over a fixed longitude on Earth, as it’ll always stay in line of sight overhead.

Manufactured by Space Systems Loral, EchoStar XVI will provide 32 Ku-Band transponders for customers in the United States and will also be part of the DISH Network’s Direct-To-Home DTH services. EchoStar XVI will be parked at 61.5° degrees west longitude and is expected to have a 15 year lifespan.

But long after its primary mission has ended, EchoStar XVI and other satellites like it in the GEO constellation will continue to drift around the Earth. Perfectly preserved with only radiation and the occasional micro-meteoroid impact to threaten them, these could well become the oldest testimony to our existence.

If nothing else, projects such as The Last Pictures make us stop and think about ourselves. What do we value, and what would we show to a future time of our existence, given a limited space to say it?